WITH demands for a full-scale investigation of
the manipulation of intelligence by the administration of US
President Geroge W. Bush mounting steadily, it appears increasingly
clear that key officials and their allies outside the administration
intended to use the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as a
pretext for going to war against Iraq within hours of the attacks
themselves.

Within the administration, the principals appear
to have included Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Vice President Dick Cheney and his
national security adviser, I. Lewis Libby, among others in key posts
in the National Security Council and the State Department.

Outside the administration, key figures included
close friends of both Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, including Richard
Perle, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) chief James Woolsey–both
members of Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board (DPB); Frank Gaffney,
head of the arms-industry-funded Center for Security Policy; and
William Kristol, editor of Rupert Murdoch-owned Weekly Standard and
chairman of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), among
others.

PNAC, which is based on the fifth floor of
American Enterprise Institute (AEI) building, in downtown
Washington, was founded in 1997 with the signing of a statement of
principles calling for “a Reaganite policy of military strength
and moral clarity,” signed by 25 prominent neo-conservatives and
right-wingers, including, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney and Libby, as
well as several other senior Bush administration officials.

Ground work for war

A close examination of the public record
indicates that all of these individuals–both in and outside the
administration–were actively preparing the ground within days,
even hours, after the 9/11 attacks, for an eventual attack on Iraq,
whether or not it had any role in the attacks or any connection to
al-Qaeda.

The challenge, in their view, was to persuade
the public that such links either did indeed exist or were
sufficiently likely to exist that a preventive strike against Iraq
was warranted. Their success in that respect was stunning, although,
in order to pull it off, they also had to distort and exaggerate the
evidence being collected by US intelligence agencies.

A hint of a deliberate campaign to connect Iraq
with the 9/11 attacks and al-Qaeda surfaced last month in a June
televised interview of Gen. Wesley Clark on the popular
public-affairs program, Meet the Press. In answer to a question,
Clark asserted, “There was a concerted effort during the fall of
2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism
problem on Saddam Hussein.”

“It came from the White House, it came from
other people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a
call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying,
‘You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored
terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.’”

Media campaign

While Clark has not yet identified who called
him, Perle, Woolsey, Gaffney, and Kristol were using the same
language in their media appearances on 9/11 and over the following
weeks.

“This could not have been done without help of
one or more governments,” Perle told The Washington Post on
September 11. “Someone taught these suicide bombers how to fly
large airplanes. I don’t think that can be done without the
assistance of large governments.”

Woolsey was more direct. “[I]t’s not
impossible that terrorist groups could work together with the
government . . . the Iraqi government has been quite closely
involved with a number of Sunni terrorist groups and–on some
matters–has had direct contact with [Osama] bin Laden,” he told
one anchorman in a series of at least half a dozen national
television appearances on September 11 and 12.

That same evening, Kristol echoed Woolsey on
National Public Radio. “I think Iraq is, actually, the big,
unspoken sort of elephant in the room today. There’s a fair amount
of evidence that Iraq has had very close associations with Osama bin
Laden in the past, a lot of evidence that it had associations with
the previous effort to destroy the World Trade Center [in 1993].”

While Kristol and Co. were trying to implicate
Hussein in the public debate, their friends in the administration
were pushing hard in the same direction. Cheney, according to
published accounts, had already confided to friends even before
September 11 that he hoped the Bush administration would remove
Hussein from power.

War council meeting

But the evidence about Rumsfeld is even more
dramatic. According to an account by veteran CBS newsman David
Martin in September, Rumsfeld was “telling his aides to start
thinking about striking Iraq, even though there was no evidence
linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks” five hours after an
American Airlines jet slammed into the Pentagon.

Martin attributed his account in part to notes
that had been taken at the time by a Rumsfeld aide. They quote the
defense chief asking for the “best info fast” to “judge
whether good enough to hit SH [Saddam Hussein] at the same time, not
only UBL [Usama bin Laden]. The administration should go massive . .
. sweep it all up, things related and not,” the notes quote
Rumsfeld as saying.

Wolfowitz shared those views, according to an
account of the meeting September 15 and 16 of the administration’s
war council at Camp David provided by The Washington Post’s Bob
Woodward and Dan Balz. In the “I-was-there” style for which
Woodward, whose access to powerful officials since his investigative
role in the Watergate scandal almost 30 years ago is unmatched, is
famous:

“Wolfowitz argued [at the meeting] that the
real source of all the trouble and terrorism was probably Hussein.
The terrorist attacks of September 11 created an opportunity to
strike. Now, Rumsfeld asked again: ‘Is this the time to attack
Iraq?’”

“Powell objected,” the Woodward and Balz
account continued, citing Secretary of State Colin Powell’s
argument that US allies would not support a strike on Iraq. “If
you get something pinning September 11 on Iraq, great,” Powell is
quoted as saying. But let’s get Afghanistan now. If we do that, we
will have increased our ability to go after Iraq–if we can prove
Iraq had a role.”

Upon their return to Washington, Rumsfeld and
Wolfowitz convened a secret, two-day meeting of the DPB chaired by
Perle. Instead of focusing on the first steps in carrying out a
“war on terrorism,” however, the discussions centered on how
Washington could use 9/11 to strike at Iraq, according to an account
in the Wall Street Journal. Unlike Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the
opposition Iraqi National Congress (INC), neither the State
Department nor the CIA was invited to participate in the meeting.

Collecting signatures

After those deliberations concluded, however,
Woolsey was sent–it remains unclear under whose authority–to
London to collect evidence of any possible ties between Baghdad and
al-Qaeda.

Although he returned empty-handed, that did not
prevent him and his close associates on the DPB from writing and
speaking out in the press about Hussein’s alleged–and completely
unconfirmed–role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and any
other rumor, dubiously-sourced story, or allegations by INC-supplied
defectors that appeared to implicate Hussein in terrorist activities
in general and with al-Qaeda in particular.

But even as the DPB was locked in the Pentagon,
Kristol was gathering signatures on a letter to Bush, eventually
published in PNAC’s name in The Washington Times September 20,
advising him on targets in his war on terrorism, an agenda that so
far has anticipated to a remarkable degree the evolution of Bush’s
actual policy. In addition to calling for the ouster of the Taliban
and war on al-Qaeda–as well as cutting off the Palestinian
Authority under Yassir Arafat and other moves–the letter stated
explicitly that Saddam Hussein must go regardless of his
relationship to the attacks or al-Qaeda.

“It may be that the Iraqi government provided
assistance in some form to the recent attack on the United
States,” it said. “But even if evidence does not link Iraq
directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of
terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to
remove Saddam Hussein from power. Failure to undertake such an
effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in
the war on international terrorism.”

The letter was signed by 38 prominent
neo-conservatives, many of whom–especially Perle, Kristol,
Gaffney, William Bennett, DPB member Eliot Cohen, AEI’s Reuel Marc
Gerecht and Kirkpatrick, Robert Kagan, syndicated columnist Charles
Krauthammer, Clifford May and Randy Scheunemann (who would go on to
head the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq)–would emerge, along
with Woolsey, as the most ubiquitous champions of war with Iraq
outside the administration.

It was the same people who, on behalf of their
friends in the Pentagon, also mounted an almost constant campaign
against the CIA, the State Department, and anyone else who tried to
slow the drive to war or question the administration’s assertions
about Hussein’s links with al-Qaeda or the threat he posed to US
security.

Mind conditioning

Their success is beyond question. By last
October, just before the House of Representatives was to vote on
giving Bush authority to go to war, a survey by the Pew Research
Center found that two-thirds of adult respondents believed that
“Saddam Hussein helped the terrorists in the September 11
attacks.”

While that percentage has declined over time, a
strong majority was found late last month to believe that Hussein
supported al-Qaeda, and a remarkable 52 percent believe that the US
has actually found “clear evidence in Iraq” of close ties
between the two. A mere 7 percent in the latter poll said they
believed “there was no connection at all,” the finding which
most accurately reflects the views of the US intelligence community.
-- Inter Press Service